An increasing quantity of information and of tools for accessing such information (e.g. multimedia items) is being made available by the recent widespread diffusion of advance communications technique and infrastructures and also by the convergence between the world of information technology and the world of media and entertainment. As a consequence an increasing number of formats, interfaces and access protocols must be dealt with at the same time. In this environment it is extremely important the availability for the users (in particular for those who are not technically skilled) of fast and intuitive tools for combining different components together. It is more and more usual to implement the combination of components with the use of MashUp, i.e. a combination of contents or services from one or more applications, which creates a new application that can include topics, information and services from several different sources. Mashup combines some of the most innovative features of Web 2.0: the vision of the network as a platform where, thanks to shared protocols, applications are able to communicate with each other, the tendency on the part of best known web sites to make contents and services freely available, and the participation of users, who increasingly become independent producer of contents and services. The result of a MashUp can be unique and unprecedented, especially for the opportunity to mix different information types, and it can be really innovative if you make available tools that allow an easy MashUp design and creation also to users with minimal technical knowledge. The Gadget of Google Desktop and Pipes of Yahoo are two examples of this important technology trend in Web 2.0 context.
Similarly in the context of large enterprise organizations, operational processes are evolving and changing so rapidly that it's more and more difficult to adapt real time operation support systems in real time. This is even more difficult considering heterogeneous and ever-changing needs of people involved in operational processes. Such complexity makes it really hard to meet all the requirements and suggestions when developing workflows which guide operational activities. This implies that for a lot of critical activities and issues every operator/technician or group of operators/technicians often find ad-hoc solutions and implement them themselves. As a consequence these solutions can only be used by a restricted set of users thus preventing a proper spreading of individual knowledge.
Furthermore Web Services technologies, which can be well considered de facto standard for system integration, provide some basic components: a sort of commonly understood language for defining access interfaces for accessing a service through the web, independently from the implementing technology actually used and a set of protocols integrated with the Web environment for invoking the service.
However, even though Web Services technique ensures the syntactic compatibility for systems communications, they still have strict limitations as far as the semantic characterization is concerned.
Several attempts have been made in the area of Semantic Web to try to define rules and standards for a semantic characterization of a web service or a system. E.g. languages such as OWL-S and SAWSDL allow to describe the semantic of an operation performed through a Web Service and of the related input and output, by defining a set of ontologies. Ontology is a well known concept in the field of Artificial Intelligence, particular in knowledge representation for formally defining semantic concepts in a specific domain and the relationships among those concepts.
Even though OWL-S and SAWSDL languages can represent a valid solution for supporting creation of basic functional blocks, they show strong limitations in relation to maintenance/updating of the represented knowledge. In the field of social network analysis it is becoming common to use the so-called folksonomies for assigning semantic meanings. In particular a folksonomy describes a characterization of information being generated by users of social networks through the use of keywords (or tag) freely selected by the users themselves. The term folksonomy is a neologism composed by the words “folk” and “tassonomy”; a folksonomy is therefore a tassonomy which has been created by the user of the information according to subjective criteria.
Folksonomies allow to overcome the problems of maintenance/updating of the ontologies, usual in the Semantic Web approach, however they are characterized by a degree of redundancy and lack of structure which render them rather difficult to handle. Patent Application WO2008/119650 describes an example of using folksonomies to implement a system for facilitating the creation/modification of business processes with the help of a knowledge base including a collaborative classification system which stores information regarding a group of services usable by composition applications.
It would be highly desirable a reliable tool which is able to assist a user in the composition of functional blocks in order to avoid discovering, at a later stage, that they are not really compatible from a “semantic” point of view.